The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cooking for 1,000 each week: Her labor of love
In her spare time, she prepares food to send to her native Haiti.
Miami custodian Doramise Moreau prepares meals singlehandedly; church volunteers serve or take them to shut-ins.
Doramise Moreau toils long past midnight in her tiny kitchen every Friday, boiling lemon peels, crushing fragrant garlic and onion into a spice blend she rubs onto chicken and turkey, cooking the dried beans that accompany the yellow rice she’ll deliver to a Miami church.
She has singlehandedly cooked 1,000 meals a week since the pandemic’s start. It’s an act of love she’s content to perform with little compensation.
Moreau, a 60-year-old widow who lives with her children, nephew and three grandchildren, cooks in the kitchen of a home built by Habitat for Humanity in 2017.
She works part-time as a custodian at a technical school, walking or taking the bus. But the work of her heart, the reason she rises each morning, is feeding the hungry.
As a little girl in Haiti, she often pilfered food from her parents’ pantry — some dried rice and beans, maybe an onion or an ear of corn — to give to someone who needed it.
“Sometimes when you’re looking at people in their face, they don’t need to ask you,” she said. “You can see they need something.”
Decades later, Moreau is still feeding the hungry. She borrows the church truck to buy groceries on Thursdays and Fridays and cooks into the wee hours of the night for Saturday meals. Notre Dame d’haiti Catholic Church pays for the food, relying on donations. Moreau prepares the meals singlehandedly, while church volunteers
serve or deliver them to shut-ins.
Moreau also feeds people back in her little village north of Port-au-prince. Despite her meager salary, she sends food pallets monthly to relatives and neighbors, telling her sister over the phone to make sure this person gets a bag of rice and that person gets the sardines.
Every morning before work, for the church’s staff, police and local community
leaders, Moreau prepares a table with a special Haitian hot tea to ward off colds. She lays out vapors to inhale and other remedies from her homeland believed to strengthen the immune system.
“She takes care of everybody from A to Z,” said Reginald Jean-mary, pastor at the church. “She goes beyond the scope of work to be a presence of hope and compassion for others.”
When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic one year ago Thursday, it did so only after weeks of resisting the term and maintaining that the highly infectious virus still could be stopped. A year later, the U.N. agency is still struggling to keep on top of the evolving science of COVID-19, to persuade countries to abandon their nationalistic tendencies and to help get vaccines where they’re most needed. Mistakes were made
The agency made some costly missteps along the way: It advised people against wearing masks for months and asserted that COVID-19 wasn’t widely spread in the air. It also declined to publicly call out countries — particularly China — for mistakes that senior WHO officials grumbled about privately.
That created tricky politics that challenged WHO’S credibility and wedged it between two world powers, setting off Trump administration criticism from which the agency is only now emerging.
President Joe Biden’s support for WHO may provide some much-needed breathing space, but the organization still faces a monumental task ahead as it tries to project some moral authority amid a universal scramble for vaccines that is leaving billions of people unprotected.
“WHO has been a bit behind, being cautious rather than precautionary,” said Gian Luca Burci, a former WHO legal counsel now at Geneva’s Graduate Institute. “At times of panic, of a crisis and so on, maybe being more out on a limb — taking a risk — would have been better.”
First warning
WHO waved its first big warning flag on Jan. 30, 2020, by calling the outbreak an international health emergency. But
many countries ignored or overlooked the warning.
Only when WHO Director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a “pandemic” six weeks later, on March 11, did most governments take action, experts said. By then, it was too late, and the virus had reached every continent except Antarctica.
A year later, WHO still appears hamstrung. A Who-led team that traveled to China in January to investigate the origins of COVID-19 was criticized for failing to dismiss China’s fringe theory that the virus might be spread via tainted frozen seafood.
That came after WHO repeatedly lauded China last year for its speedy, transparent response — even though recordings of
private meetings obtained by The Associated Press showed that top officials were frustrated at the country’s lack of cooperation.
“Everybody has been wondering why WHO was so praising of China back in January (2020),” Burci said, adding that the praise has come back “to haunt WHO big-time.”
Costly blunders
Some experts say WHO’S blunders came at a high price, and it remains too reliant on ironclad science instead of taking calculated risks to keep people safer — on strategies such as mask-wearing or on whether COVID-19 is often spread through the air.
“Without a doubt,
WHO’S failure to endorse masks earlier cost lives,” said Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, a professor of primary care health sciences at Oxford University who sits on several WHO expert committees. Not until June did WHO advise people to regularly wear masks, long after other health agencies and numerous countries did so.
Greenhalgh said she was less interested in asking WHO to atone for past errors than revising its policies going forward. In October, she wrote to the head of a key WHO committee on infection control, raising concerns about the lack of expertise among some members. She never received a response.
“This scandal is not just in the past. It’s in the present
and escalating into the future,” Greenhalgh said.
Raymond Tellier, an associate professor at Canada’s Mcgill University who specializes in coronaviruses, said WHO’S continued reluctance to acknowledge how often COVID-19 is spread in the air could prove more dangerous with the arrival of new virus variants first identified in Britain and South Africa that are even more transmissible.
“If WHO’S recommendations are not strong enough, we could see the pandemic go on much longer,” he said.
Helping poor countries
With several licensed vaccines, WHO is now working to ensure that people in the world’s poorest countries receive doses through the COVAX initiative, which is aimed at ensuring poor countries get COVID-19 vaccines.
But COVAX has only a fraction of the 2 billion vaccines it is hoping to deliver by the end of the year. Some countries that have waited months for shots have grown impatient, opting to sign their own private deals for quicker vaccine access.
WHO chief Tedros has responded largely by appealing to countries to act in “solidarity,” warning that the world is on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” if vaccines are not distributed fairly. Although he has asked rich countries to share their doses immediately with developing countries and not to strike new deals that would jeopardize the vaccine supply for poorer countries, none have obliged.
“WHO is trying to lead by moral authority, but repeating ‘solidarity’ over and over when it’s being ignored by countries acting in their own self-interest shows they are not recognizing reality,” said Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development. “It’s time to call things out for the way they are.”